Why organisations succeed or fail has long been one of Professor Adrian Wilkinson’s key areas of research, with his work in this field recognised across the world.
The latest acknowledgement comes from a landmark review of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee which cites a 2004 paper on organisational failure.
“Here we see a good example of academic work meeting the double hurdle of rigor and relevancein matters of global significance,” Professor Wilkinson, Director of Griffith’s Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing, said.
The Bank of England review was a direct upshot of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.
“Itspolicies and practices came under sharp scrutiny as the entire banking system edged close to catastropheand the transparency of its operations was subject to review,” Professor Wilkinson said.
“The Bank had been given operational independence in 1997 and sought to build trust with key stakeholders, but post GFC a number of stakeholders sought greater information about how the Bank carried out its work.”
Areview led by Kevin Warsh, former member of the Board of Governors ofthe Federal Reserve System, followed. It evaluated transparency practices focusing on the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee.
In addressing why some organisations success and others fail, the review referred to a 2004 paper published by the International Journal of Management Reviews. In the paper, Adrian Wilkinson and Kemal Mellahi present a critique of research and proposed integrative frameworks on organisational failure.
“Warsh examined academic research on organisational decision-makingand organisational failure and here drew on our work to shed light on what factors explain failure and, in particular,how they linked internal management inadequacies to management failure,” Professor Wilkinson said.
“A key themewasthe need for genuine deliberation rather than rubber stamping structures.”
Enduring
The review concludes that genuine deliberation is an essential feature of sound policy making, an enduring idea that is to be found in the work of Professor Wilkinson on employee voice and silence during the past 25 years.
Professor Wilkinson led a re-evaluation of employment relations in the wake of the GFC when he edited the latest edition of the Oxford Handbook of Employment Relations with Geoffrey Wood and Richard Deeg. He also co-edited the Handbook of Research on Employee Voice around the same period.
Professor Wilkinson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was conferred the Award of Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences for his contributions to the Social Sciences in 2011, and appointed a British Academy of Management (BAM) Fellow in 2010.
In 2012 he was listed among the top 20 most influential HR thinkers in the world by HR Magazine.
